Slides, an App, a Meetup, and More On the Way

I’ve been busy. Seriously. Here’s a short dump of what I’ve been up to with links and stuff. Hopefully it’ll do until I can get back to my regular blogging routine.

PICC ’11 Slides Posted

I gave a Python talk at PICC ’11. If you were there, then you have a suboptimal version of the slides, both because I caught a few bugs, and also because they’re in a flattened, lifeless PDF file, which sort of mangles anything even slightly fancy. I’m not sure how much value you’ll get out of these because my presentation slides tend to present code that I then explain, and you won’t have the explanation, but people are asking, so here they are in all their glory. Enjoy!

I Made a Webapp Designed To Fail

No really, I did. WebStatusCodes is the product of necessity. I’m writing a Python module that provides an easy way for people to talk to a web API. I test my code, and for some of the tests I want to make sure my code reacts properly to certain HTTP errors (or in some cases, to *any* HTTP status code that’s not 200). In unit tests this isn’t hard, but when you’re starting to test the network layers and beyond, you need something on the network to provide the errors. That’s what WebStatusCodes does. It’s also a simple-but-handy reference for HTTP status codes, though it is incomplete (418 I’m a teapot is not supported). Still, worth checking out.

Interesting to note, this is my first AppEngine application, and I believe it took me 20 minutes to download the SDK, get something working, and get it deployed. It was like one of those ‘build a blog in -15 minutes’ moments. Empowering the speed at which you can create things on AppEngine, though I’d be slow to consider it for anything much more complex.

Systems and Devops People, Hack With Me!

I like systems-land, and a while back I was stuck writing some reporting code, which I really don’t like, so I started a side project to see just how much cool stuff I could do using the /proc filesystem and nothing but pure Python. I didn’t get too far because the reporting project ended and I jumped back into all kinds of other goodness, but there’s a github project called pyproc that’s just a single file with a few functions in it right now, and I’d like to see it grow, so fork it and send me pull requests. If you know Linux systems pretty well but are relatively new to Python, I’ll lend you a hand where I can, though time will be a little limited until the book is done (see further down).

The other projects I’m working on are sort of in pursuit of larger fish in the Devops waters, too, so be sure to check out the other projects I mention later in this post, and follow me on github.

Python Meetup Group in Princeton NJ

I started a Meetup group for Pythonistas that probably work in NYC or PA, but live in NJ. I work in PA, and before this group existed, the closest group was in Philly, an hour from home. I put my feelers out on Twitter, found some interest, put up a quick Meetup site, and we had 13 people at the first meetup (more than had RSVP’d). It’s a great group of folks, but more is always better, so check it out if you’re in the area. We hold meetings at the beautiful Princeton Public Library (who found uson twitter and now sponsors the group!), which is just a block or so from Triumph, the local microbrewery. I’m hoping to have a post-meeting impromptu happy hour there at some point.

Python Cookbook Progress

The Python Cookbook continues its march toward production. Lots of work has been done, lots of lessons have been learned, lots of teeth have been gnashed. The book is gonna rock, though. I had the great pleasure of porting all of the existing recipes that are likely to be kept over to Python 3. Great fun. It’s really amazing to see just how it happens that a 20-line recipe is completely obviated by the addition of a single, simple language feature. It’s happened in almost every chapter I’ve looked at so far.

If you have a recipe, or stumble upon a good example of some language feature, module, or other useful tidbit, whether it runs in Python 3 or not, let me know (see ‘Contact Me’). The book is 100% Python 3, but I’ve gotten fairly adept at porting things over by now Send me your links, your code, or whatever. If we use the recipe, the author will be credited in the book, of course.

PyRabbit is Coming

In the next few days I’ll be releasing a Python module on github that will let you easily work with RabbitMQ servers using that product’s HTTP management API. It’s not nearly complete, which is why I’m releasing it. It does some cool stuff already, but I need another helper or two to add new features and help do some research into how RabbitMQ broker configuration affects JSON responses from the API. Follow me on github if you want to be the first to know when I get it released. You probably also want to follow myYearbook on github since that’s where I work, and I might release it through the myYearbook github organization (where we also release lots of other cool open source stuff).

Python Asynchronous AMQP Consumer Module

I’m also about 1/3 of the way through a project that lets you write AMQP consumers using the same basic model as you’d write a Tornado application: write your handler, import the server, link the two (like, one line of code), and call consume(). In fact, it uses the Tornado IOLoop, as well as Pika, which is an asynchronous AMQP module in Python (maintained by none other than my boss and myYearbook CTO, @crad), which also happens to support the Tornado IOLoop directly.

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Something you may want to consider as a recipe is the urllib.parse techniques for handling both str and bytes with a specific encoding (in this case ASCII) via coercion of the arguments and return value.